---
title: Google Workspace provider
authentik_enterprise: true
---

With the Google Workspace provider, authentik serves as the single source of truth for all users and groups, when using Google products like Gmail.

- For instructions to configure your Google Workspace to integrate with authentik, refer to [Configure Google Workspace](./setup-gws.md).
- For instructions to add Google Workspace as a provider, refer to [Create a Google Workspace provider](./add-gws-provider.md).

## About using Google Workspace with authentik

The following sections discuss how Google Workspace operates with authentik.

### Discovery

When first creating the provider and setting it up correctly, the provider will run a discovery and query your google workspace for all users and groups, and attempt to match them with their respective counterparts in authentik.

This matching is done by email address for users as google uses that as their primary identifier, and using group names for groups. This discovery also takes into consideration any **User filtering** options configured in the provider, such as only linking to authentik users in a specific group or excluding service accounts. This discovery happens every time before a full sync is started.

### Synchronization

There are two types of synchronization: a direct sync and a full sync.

A _direct sync_ happens when a user or group is created, updated or deleted in authentik, or when a user is added to or removed from a group. When one of these events happens, the direct sync automatically forwards those changes to Google Workspace.

The _full sync_ happens when the provider is initially created and when it is saved. The full sync goes through all users and groups matching the **User filtering** options set and will create/update them in Google Workspace. After the initial sync, authentik will run a full sync every four hours to ensure the consistency of users and groups.

During the full sync, if a user or group was created in authentik and a matching user/group exists in Google Workspace, authentik will automatically link them together. Furthermore, users present in authentik but not in Google Workspace will be created and and linked.

When a property mapping has an invalid expression, it will cause the sync to stop to prevent errors from being spammed. To handle any kind of network interruptions, authentik will detect transient request failures and retry any sync tasks.

### Customization for data mapping

There are a couple of considerations in regard to how authentik data is mapped to google workspace user/group data by default.

- For users, authentik only saves the full display name, while Google requires given/family name separately, and as such authentik attempts to separate the full name automatically with the default User property mapping.

- For groups, Google groups require an email address. Thus in authentik the provider configuration has an option **Default group email domain**, which will be used in conjunction with the group’s name to generate an email address. This can be customized with a property mapping.

- By default, authentik maps a user’s email, a user’s name, and their active status. For groups, the name is synced.

Refer to Google documentation for further details on which fields data can be mapped to:

- https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/directory/reference/rest/v1/users#User
- https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/directory/reference/rest/v1/groups#Group
